First Printed Notice: The Annual Catholic Culture Conference

We are just two months away from the annual Catholic Culture Conference at the Spiritual Life Center. From the Wichita diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Advance:

. . . A Catholic culture is an environment which fosters our authentic development in mind, body, and spirit. John Senior described this culture as “the natural environment of truth, assisted by art, ordered intrinsically, that is, from within – to the praise, reverence, and service of God our Lord. To restore it, we must learn its language.”

This is the motivation, and hope, for the 2nd Annual Catholic Culture Conference April 22-23 at the Spiritual Life Center. The theme of this year’s conference is “Reviving the Catholic Imagination.”

Our keynote speaker is Dr. Anthony Esolen. Professor Esolen currently serves as professor of English at Providence College, and is perhaps best known for his widely acclaimed translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He has also authored several original works, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization and the satirically titled Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He regularly writes for publications including The Catholic Thing and Crisis Magazine.

Dr. Esolen will give three presentations at the conference. A keynote presentation entitled “The Smallest of the Seeds: The Union of All Things in Christ” on Friday, April 22, followed “Dante and the Glorious Liberty of the Children of God” and “Assaults on Spiritual Liberty” on Saturday, April 23. The conference will also feature other presentations by regional and local speakers including Bo Bonner, Stephanie Mann, Jackie Arnold, Matthew Umbarger, and Fr. Ken Van Haverbeke.
Gates is assistant program director at the center.

Want to hear Esolen?

Space is limited to the first 150 registrants. Sign up early by calling the Spiritual Life Center at (316) 744-0167 or online at SLCWichita.org. Registration includes a wine and appetizer social Friday evening, and breakfast and lunch on Saturday. Early bird rates, by April 11, are commuter $55, single occupancy $85, double occupancy $75.

I'm preparing my presentation now: "Cobbett, Chesterton, and Merry Old England."

William Cobbett, RIP and his book on the English Reformation

William Cobbett died on June 18, 1835. He was an English pamphleteer and supporter of Emancipation for Catholics, writing a history of the Protestant reformation in England. He very much believed that Henry VIII's takeover of the Church in England was a matter of political power and disastrous for England economically and socially.

Cobbett took controversial stands on the need for reforms in England, especially of Parliament and the military. He also wrote against the French Revolution, democracy in America, the Industrial Revolution, and Malthus' theories of population.

G.K. Chesterton published a biography of Cobbett in 1925, in which he wrote:

It is the paradox of his life that he loved the past, and he alone lived in the future. . . . he seemed like a survival and a relic of times gone by. And he alone was in living touch with the times that were to come.

Chesterton also compares Cobbett and Lingard, noting that Father Lingard and Cobbett made the same case about the English Reformation, but that Lingard was careful about being impartial while Cobbett "flung away all such airs of impartiality to prove how completely he had been convinced" that the common view of the English Reformation was wrong.

I am reading Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland had find it just as Chesterton described. Sometimes Cobbett has to restrain himself and sometimes he just can't! He stops one time to comment that if he keeps writing such exclamatory sentences, he will never make progress in telling the story! He rakes Hume over the coals for special pleading and manipulation or interpretation of facts so that Catholics always sound bad. Cobbett consistently argues that the poor were hurt by the actions of the English "reformers"--destroying sources of charity in dissolving the monasteries, wrecking sights of beauty in remodeling the churches, etc. Cardinal Gasquet provided footnotes, including some corrections in the edition I have from St. Benedict's/TAN.